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Who is this frightening example of ADHD? Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer; the most well-loved example of precocious boyhood behavior in American literature. Nowadays you can be sure that Tom would be put on Ritalin and all that naturally impulsive inquisitiveness that made Aunt Polly throw up her hands in despair would be destroyed. Or, perhaps Tom would be prescribed a newer drug such as Strattera, which comes with a seemingly endless list of side-effects (as they all do), such as suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, aggressiveness, mania, liver damage, and impotence. Incredibly, according to Strattera’s own label, the drug company Eli Lilly received FDA approval after submitting a mere six clinical trials on 759 children and 536 adults for six to nine weeks.
 “Patients” like Tom Sawyer are being told ADHD is a “disease” and they are being coerced to take medication. If they don’t, Social Services have the power to remove them from their families and put them in foster care or mental institutions.
These toxic pills have the effect of chemically straight-jacketing children, just as kids like Andrea and Tommy have described. Where did the idea of the straightjacket originate, because I would like to humbly point out that as a parent, I believe my children’s brains are important enough for me to want to know the history of how this mental straight-jacketing came into being.
Straightjackets were first introduced at the turn of the century, along with electric shock, hosing down, shackles, lobotomy and holes being drilled into brains to relieve “brain pressure.” German physicians gave birth to the idea of mental diseases of the brain, lending credence to the idea of treating it in the same way one might treat a physical disease. Psychiatry and the German State worked together to institutionalize those with “damaged minds,” which is really a form of the elite engineering eugenics on an unsuspecting public. As Dr. Szasz says, “The evil genius of psychiatry… continues to lie in its ability to convince itself, the legal system, and the public that…there is no conflict between the legitimate interests of the individual and the legitimate interests of the political class in charge of the state.”
Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), a prominent nineteenth-century German neuropsychiatrist observed, "The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom." This started with the abuses described above, as well as other "benevolent tortures," such as frightening patients by throwing them into snake pits, the origin of the term "snake pit" for insane asylum. These horrific restraints were precursors to the current drugs.
The methods of restraint are now so much more humane than in the past: little pills. But what are in these pills? The only major difference between giving a child illegal cocaine or legal Ritalin is that you have to give the child a greater dose of cocaine than Ritalin to achieve the same result. Certainly, the child appears quieter and sits still in a chair for hours on end—something that our school system demands. But I ask you, what child in his or her right mind should want to, or should be forced to, sit for hours every day in a chair doing sheet after sheet of boring, rote paperwork and being given countless “standardized tests” to evaluate “success or failure?” Children who rebel against sitting like this (often the brightest and most individual thinkers) but nevertheless are forced to, due to a chemical straightjacket, are not attentive—they are zoned out, their developing brains bombarded by drugs that even the psychiatrists admit they don’t understand.
It was in 1973 that the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which includes the National Institute of Mental Health, created the Special Education Program for children with “learning disabilities.” This gave birth to a whole new army of experts who had to be trained and employed and as such, had to justify their employment by identifying a certain number of Special Needs students in each school—because for every Special Needs child, the government provides extra funding. In 1991, teachers were mandated to “actively seek to identify ADHD children.”
Calvin & Hobbs on Ritalin
Related Article - The ADHD HOAX
Surely, one would think that with this epidemic hitting American children, science has a stringent objective test to clearly identify the ADHD child. This is absolutely not the case. Here is an example of how ridiculous the identifying methods are. Fidgetiness, such as that expressed by Tom Sawyer and his mates, seems to be of special interest to modern psychiatrists as a means of identifying those with ADHD. University of Utah Psychiatrist Paul Wender, known as the Dean of ADHD, suggests that an excellent way for laymen, such as teachers and co-workers, to make a diagnosis of ADHD is to check for fidgetiness---and a perfect way to test for this is to observe whether or not the subject has “restless feet.” He states:
“Since restless feet are readily observed—in cafeterias, waiting rooms and group meetings—the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity (of hyperactivity)…could be rapidly tested in such areas by inquiry about individual and family history of, say, alcoholism, academic achievement, and imprisonment in a random sample of those with jiggling and stationary feet.” (http://www.sntp.net/ritalin/ritalin_myth.html)
After offering this ridiculously subjective diagnostic method, this same learned Dean of ADHD states in the July 1,1996 Psychiatric Times that , “We cannot meaningfully determine how sensitive and specific our criteria for ADHD are because we do not have any means of determining whether an individual patient ‘really’ has the disorder.” (Emphasis mine.)
Incredibly, he goes on to conclude this contradictory discourse by saying: “ADHD is a common, genetically transmitted disorder. It is usually undiagnosed but fairly easily diagnosed.”
Do not imagine that just because this man uses impressive sounding words and he has a bunch of letters after his name he is making any sense. What he is saying makes no sense at all. Yet he is revered as an expert and heaven help the ignorant parent who dares to question his authority. Well, I have jiggling feet (in fact, they are jiggling right now as I write), my brother, a philosophy professor, has jiggling feet, my son Max has jiggling feet. Clearly, we should be concerned about our ability to function in society and our propensity towards alcoholism and imprisonment. Max, who is somewhat of a kidder, when reprimanded in school to stop jiggling his feet told his teacher that he had “restless leg syndrome” and had “forgotten to take his medication.” This was not considered funny by his teacher—which is one of the many reasons why he is no longer in public school. Fortunately, his teacher in his charter school has a much better sense of humor.
I was blessed to grow up in a family where reason was extolled by my parents and there was never an excuse for bad behavior. It was accepted that children would do wrong. The important thing was to take responsibility, learn from the experience and do better next time. My dad is a Christian writer and as a child we traveled the world so he could gain inspiration for his books. For a time, we lived in a small village in Switzerland and our parents made us attend the village school, an experience that we kids strongly objected to but that they, in their wisdom, knew would be good for us. That school bore a striking similarity to the school described by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer. My teacher, Madame Petriquin, was an elderly woman who seriously looked like a conglomeration of all Disney’s ugliest witches rolled into one. Her favorite forms of discipline were vicious kicks and ear twists. All of the kids were boisterous and regularly misbehaved. But when Madame yelled—and I mean yelled—quiet descended, except for two boys who, no matter what, continued their bad behavior. My sister and I even nicknamed one of them Tom Sawyer and the other Huck Finn. At recess, the teachers (there were only two of them) locked themselves in their rooms for a much-needed break, while the kids ran wild outside—and I mean wild.
They were impulsive, mischievous and down-right wicked. I learned quickly not to stand at the top of the stairs or I would get pushed down. One small kid named Jean Pierre liked to jump on my back and pull my hair so hard I was sure he would pull it all out. No one would help me. They all just stood around enjoying my humiliation. I hated that little kid and I dreaded him. I did not know why he had singled me out for punishment or how to make him stop. One day, I was drawing with some colored pencils my mom had given me when Jean Pierre sidled up. I tensed, prepared to defend myself. But he sat down beside me and reached out politely, asking, I assumed, if he could draw too. We proceeded to sit together in perfect harmony, drawing. I then did something that I would have not thought possible before that moment. I gave him the pencils to keep. His impish face lit up with happiness and after that day, I never had another problem with Jean Pierre. We became fast friends. A little experimentation in the art of negotiation, a little attempt at communication and understanding went a long way towards bridging what had seemed to be an impassable gulf. I had assumed that Jean Pierre was insane—that they were all insane. But they weren’t. They were normal kids who were running wilder than I was used to. I have no doubt that they all grew up and became at least somewhat more sedate, having learned the important lessons they were supposed to learn on the playground.
Putting children on medication deprives them of the vital experience of learning how to face challenges and overcome them. I have talked to young people in their twenties who were on medication as children and express exactly this sentiment—that they never felt like they grew up, they never felt like they learned how to be strong inside themselves and face challenges on their own.
The American public has been coerced into accepting as normal the experimentation on and the mental straight-jacketing of their children with mind-altering drugs. Psychiatry, supported by the government and the pharmaceutical companies, has managed to do this by leading the public to believe that mental illness is a disease like any other, making imprisoning children through a mental straightjacket acceptable. This is a lie.
Since speaking with Andrea last week she has again attempted suicide and has been institutionalized. It might seem like strong language but I totally agree with Dr. Szazs when he says, “Coerced drugging is a form of ‘therapeutic’ rape.”
Karen Hunt
Click here to read Drugging Our Children to Death - Part 1
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 About the author:
Karen Hunt is the author/illustrator of nineteen children's books including the recently published "The Rumpoles & The Barleys" series. She is the co-founder of InsideOUT Writers and founder of Wordpower. Currently, she is writing "Turning," the first book in the "Night Angels" series, published with Townsend Press. Karen is an accomplished martial artist, boxer, kick boxer and Eskrima fighter. For Karen, being fit in mind, body and spirit is a way of life. You can find out more at: www.karenalainehunt.com
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Some quotes by Thomas Szasz at www.szasz.com:
"Although we may not know it, we have, in our day,
witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State."
--Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry:
An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices,
by Thomas Szasz, (New York: Macmillan, 1963, p. 212;
Chapter 18, title: "Toward the Therapeutic State.").
"If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
--The Second Sin, by Thomas Szasz, (Anchor/Doubleday,
Garden City, NY. 1973, Page 113.)
A good read: “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” by Christopher Lane, professor of English at Northwestern University.
Sites to look at and used for this essay: National Alliance Against Mandated Mental Health; ritalindeath.com; Project Censored; StoptheDrugWar.com; Coalition Against Institutionalized Child Abuse (this site lists the children that have died as a result of abuse I residential treatment facilities); sntp.net (Say NO to Psychiatry); The Myth of Attention Deficit Disorder by Dr. Mark Barber; July 1996 Psychiatric Times, Vol. 13, No. 7;
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